This topic looks cool.

If Utada's ever been a Japanese music listener's first fixation, as she's been with me, it's not so easy spotting certain qualities from both cultures. She, in my opinion, rewrites the definition of pop, so that her originality transcends both businesses. Essentially, as Utada often says, she's an "outsider," yet uniquely and simultaneously, American and Japanese. If that makes sense. It probably doesn't. She could word it better than me.

Um, before I listened to Utada, I listened to American musical showtunes and good old 90's hip-hop and R&B. The latter is the only period in which I know American music faily well. Patterns were minimal (or at least unbombastic) instrumentation, cutesy melodies, and the like. What comes to mind is Mariah Carey's Always Be My Baby. God, that song kicks ass.

Japanese pop music's easy to pin down, I think. It's hit-or-miss if songs conceive an infectious, memorable melody; otherwise, you just get something either incomplete, meandering, or empty. Example of leaden Jpop? Anything by Teppei Koike.